AMC show 'The Pitch' focuses on Chicago ad agencies

Reality show shot a couple of episodes here for its 2nd season

Portrait of Stacey McClenathan of Bee-line Communications at her Libertyville office. Bee-line will be featured in "The Pitch" on AMC. (Stacey Wescott/ Chicago Tribune)

The second season of AMC's advertising reality show "The Pitch" is zooming in on Chicago, putting four smaller agencies on a national stage as they compete for clients.

Shut out during a New York-centric inaugural season, the city is the setting for two of eight episodes this season. The first airs Thursday at 10 p.m. featuring Chicago multicultural agency commonground vying with Libertyville-based Bee-line Communications to win a one-off digital/social campaign for Little Caesars Pizza.

In addition, the second-season finale, airing Oct. 3, has Chicago agencies Central Coast and The Monogram Group competing to help reboot the Fuller Brush Co., an iconic century-old brand that declared bankruptcy last year.

Both episodes were shot in April, wrapping up filming for the season, which began in January.

"For Season 2, Chicago was basically the first place I decided to go, because it's sort of a storied advertising town, and if we're not going to go to New York, we should definitely go to Chicago," said Domini Hofmann, an executive producer on the show. "The Chicago episodes were the last episodes that we shot — I just didn't want to film there when it was snowing."

"The Pitch," which launched in April 2012, was one of AMC's first forays into reality programming. The show initially ran Sunday nights after "Mad Men," looking to piggyback on the success of the cable network's 1960s-era scripted advertising drama. That strategy was abandoned this season, and the show was shifted to the network's burgeoning reality lineup on Thursday nights.

The show averaged 330,000 viewers during the first season, according to Nielsen. Ratings have declined through the first four episodes of the second season, to about 167,000 viewers per show. Hofmann said there has been no commitment from AMC for a third season.

The show is produced by Los Angeles-based All3Media America, which also created "Undercover Boss" for CBS.

Each episode features two advertising agencies competing for a piece of business, culminating in a winning campaign. But the potential clients vetting the pitches are under no obligation to employ either shop, according to Hofmann. In fact, Florida-based College Hunks Hauling Junk, which appeared in the first episode of the season last month, reconsidered after filming and hired the losing agency.

"That probably happens in the real world all the time — people change their minds," Hofmann said.

On Thursday's show, both agencies had a week to come up with a social/digital campaign linking quality and Little Caesars, a 54-year-old Detroit-based pizza chain that serves $5 "hot-n-ready" pizzas. It was a tall order under any circumstances, but the ubiquitous presence of cameras, and the potential for an epic fail on national television, turned up the heat even more on the two local agencies.

The competing agencies seemingly had little in common besides rough geography and a desire for national exposure.

"It wasn't my objective to be in front of the camera," said Stacey McClenathan, 43, CEO of Bee-line Communications, a small agency she founded in 2005. "But when you own a marketing agency and you are smaller, how could you pass up the national publicity? It was a fabulous opportunity."

McClenathan, who worked her way up to director of global marketing communications during a decade at Motorola, had no previous agency experience before launching her firm. She said annual billings are $7 million to $10 million, which includes a significant amount of business-to-business marketing for clients such as Motorola, Medtronic, Abbott Laboratories and W.R. Cobb.

Bee-line, located in a Libertyville business park, has about 20 full-time employees, including McClenathan's husband, whose role is listed as "bouncer" on the company website. The agency committed significant resources to "The Pitch," with two-thirds of the staff on the case for more than a week developing a proposed campaign for Little Caesars.

The firm also employs about 30 people at two overseas offices, according to McClenathan.

"It was definitely consuming, because certainly we wanted to win," she said. "We weren't being paid for this, but the clock was ticking and we needed to deliver."

Commonground, launched in 2004, is a Chicago-based multicultural advertising agency with more than 100 employees and annual billings of about $35 million. Clients include MillerCoors, Coca-Cola and the Illinois Lottery, for whom the agency produced general market television spots last year.

It is the fourth-largest African-American-owned ad agency in the country, according to the 2013 annual rankings by Black Enterprise magazine.

Ahmad Islam, an Ohio native who came to Chicago in 2000 to work at Leo Burnett, is co-founder and managing partner of commonground. The fan of the show during its first season put one condition on his agency's participation after being contacted by producers to be on the second season.